The touristification of work in the post-digital city: A new structure of feeling?

This article introduces a special issue on “The touristification of work in the post-digital city”. It outlines how contemporary cities are being reshaped by two intertwined dynamics: the touristification of work and the rise of post-digital urbanism. As mobile technologies and flexible labor practices enable people to blend work with travel, new forms of “touristified work” emerge, including phenomena like “workation”, digital nomadism, and coworking cultures that frame work as an experience. At the same time, growing unease with constant connectivity fuels post-digital trends that valorize disconnection, analogue practices, artisanal labour, and spatial rootedness. Together, these developments foster alternative formations of lifestyles, values and sentiments, or, what might be seen as articulations of a new urban structure of feeling. The special issue brings together interdisciplinary contributions that examine how cities enable and accommodate to these shifting formations through the touristified staging of (post-)digital urban work spaces and how touristified work mobilities and identities reshape the very meaning of cities under post-digital conditions. Through empirical cases from Europe, Asia, and North America, the issue advances a critical understanding of the post-digital city as a space of aspiration, phantasmagoria, and contradiction.